JERSEY CITY — Bigger is better when it comes to planetariums — a bigger dome to make the audience ooh and ahh, more pixels to make the stars and planets sharper, more colors to make them more realistic, more windows on intriguing but distant nebulas, more images of Earth as a shimmering jewel against the dark drape of space.

This is especially true when the planetarium in question is in New Jersey, a state that perpetually has a chip on its shoulder. That may or may not explain the debut of the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth largest in the world. It opens this week in Jersey City.

He also noted that it sits at the edge of a park 370 acres larger than Central Park, before adding dryly, “I’m not fixated on size.”

Could this be the beginning of yet another rivalry between flashy, famous New York, with its museums and its velvet ropes and its A-list parties, and New Jersey, the Rodney Dangerfield of states? Their competitiveness, as old as muskets and three-cornered hats, has ignited disputes about everything from tunnels under the Hudson River to football teams that play in one state but keep the other state in their names.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, is diplomatic — and also pragmatic. “Schools in New Jersey might not come into the city because of the traffic and the bottlenecking that happens when you have to cross the Hudson River,” he said. “If you’re a school superintendent, you’ll think about going to the closest place.” And if it has a really good projector, he said, “That’s great.”

Mr. Hoffman said the new planetarium actually has 10 projectors. He also said that Dr. Tyson had a standing invitation “to come and run our planetarium if he gets tired of New York.”

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The planetarium, built inside a dome that used to house an Imax theater, is 110 feet in diameter, with a screen that is 89 feet in diameter.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

The planetarium here — officially the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium — is 110 feet in diameter, with a screen that is 89 feet in diameter. The Hayden Planetarium is 87 feet in diameter, and its screen is 68 feet in diameter. The Chalsty Planetarium, named for a high school teacher turned philanthropist who gave the science center $5 million to build it, has 400 seats, and the Hayden 429.

Astrophysicists say the numbers have meaning. A bigger dome is like having more memory in a laptop or more horsepower under the hood. A larger planetarium “better simulates the experience of being out in the night sky,” Mr. Hoffman said. “The experience is much more immersive.”

He is betting that the Chalsty’s digital projection system, connected to servers that can display satellite images from space almost as soon as it downloads them, will be an audience attention-getter, if only because it is the latest technology. He said the world has changed in the 17 years since the Hayden’s last big update.

“We all work on screens” nowadays, Mr. Hoffman said. “When you come here, we want you to be transported out of your normal realm.”

That means doing things ordinary laptops cannot, like zooming in on images that show the rings of Saturn as chunks of ice or a moon the size of Jersey City itself, or opening a window for a videoconference with scientists who were involved in the Cassini mission, which launched an unmanned spacecraft that circled Saturn for 13 years.

Dr. Tyson said the Hayden Planetarium has two projection systems — a traditional optical system and a digital system with seven projectors, connected to a supercomputer that can download satellite images, just as the Chalsty system can.

Going digital was a significant step for the Hayden back in 2000. Not long before that, Dr. Tyson said, digital images for planetariums “were like fuzzy cotton balls.” That “wasn’t good enough for me,” he said, so the museum installed both systems.

“My biggest fear, which I strongly layered onto the decision making for the Hayden, was if you go in and it feels like a movie theater, then you’re competing with movie-theater budgets for the experience the person’s going to have,” Dr. Tyson said. “I did not want to subject our institution to have to compete with Hollywood with visual effects, so I said we needed to have an old-fashioned theater so you would walk in and say, ‘I will not have Hollywood expectations.’”

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A larger planetarium “better simulates the experience of being out in the night sky,” said Paul Hoffman, the president and chief executive of the Liberty Science Center. “The experience is much more immersive.”CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Here in Jersey City, Mr. Hoffman may not have Hollywood expectations either, but the Chalsty has Hollywoodish roots. It was originally the largest Imax dome theater in the country, built for the film format that was long the standard for extra-large movie screens. Over the years, Imax expanded from its initial museum market, becoming a multiplex staple around the world.

“We gutted the interior” of the domed structure, Mr. Hoffman said, “and went from one film projector to 10 digital projectors. Imax film is still great, but there are fewer and fewer releases being made with it.”

Among planetariums, said David H. DeVorkin, the senior curator for the history of astronomy at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “bigness has always been a point of honor,” but it is not everything. “The deal is, How good is your sky? If the dome has ribs in it or if it has holes in it or it’s kind of dirty, you’ll see that, too. When the sky is totally dark, you don’t, but there’s a concern that anything bright will show the veins of the dome.”

The Chalsty has a brand-new screen of 588 panels and a surface area of 12,345 square feet, about the same square footage as five average homes. It is more reflective than earlier screens, Mr. Hoffman said, which makes it less likely that audiences will see through it.

Dr. DeVorkin said programming may matter more than the setup. Someone going to a planetarium probably would not care about what was behind the scenes any more than someone going to a football game would care about state-of-the-art locker rooms or even the size of the stadium. “Do you go there for the size of the stadium, or for the teams that are playing? Dr. DeVorkin said. “I would go for the teams.”

Mr. Hoffman said the programs shown at the Chalsty would be live. “We have a presenter” — Mike Shanahan, who was the manager of the University of Hawaii’s Bishop Museum Planetarium and Observatory in Honolulu before joining the science center’s staff recently. He can improvise if someone in the audience asks a question, calling up images stored on the planetarium’s server almost instantly.

The Hayden Planetarium runs live presentations for its evening programs, but Dr. Tyson said the daytime shows, scheduled to begin every 30 minutes, are “preprogrammed.”

“What we have found is the public doesn’t always know what to ask for. They come in wide-eyed and ready to learn what we have decided to teach them,” he said. “They’re waiting for you to show what you judge to be important.”

If the Chalsty has “the luxury of personnel to do all of their shows of the day live,” he said, “more power to them.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Ushering In a New Kind of Star Wars. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe